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Trotsky's conception of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers'
state in which the Stalinist bureaucracy had not yet become a bona–
fide class. And Macdonald's own notion of bureaucratic collectivism
as a new class society-in both Russia and Germany-differs only on
a few minor pointo;-and mostly verbally-from Burnham's theory of
the managerial revolution. Of the two, however, Burnham is the more
consistent. For he realizes that a new class structure cannot be a
momentary spasm in history, and that it is in contradiction with the
classic Marxist idea of socialism evolving out of capitalism. Macdonald,
on the other hand, goes right on applying the old socialist formulas
to all political situations without any serious effort to reconcile them
with the "new order" already established in Germany and Russia
and just sprouting in the United States and England. After all,
if
German fascism, as Macdonald has claimed, is a new system that
has superseded and abolished the contradictions of capitalism, then
the bottom drops out of the case for socialism. For the belief in social–
ism is grounded in the theory that capitalism cannot solve its eco–
nomic contradictions and that
only socialism
can do so; in this sense
the idea of socialism is rooted in the movement of history and becomes
realizable through objective social forces. Given Macdonld's version
of an alternative "new order," however, socialism becomes simply
a matter of moral preference. True enough, Macdonald-like Burn–
ham-has not been playing up lately his doctrine of bureaucratic
collectivism, which would suggest his realizing that it has been out–
moded by events: but I do not recall having seen any public repudia–
tion of it.
In general, though Macdonald never hesitates to belabor others
-his favorite whipping boy
is
the liberal intellectual-for their poli–
tical mistakes, he seems to be stricken with amnesia when it comes to
his own errors. Look at just a few of the predictions and political
estimates he has tossed off in the last few years. In his "10 Proposi–
tions" (July, 1941) Macdonald stated flatly that the United States
and England could not win the war because of Germany's superior po–
litical and economic organization: "By now the social system of Roose–
velt and Churchill is so incompetent to plan large-scale production
whether for war or peace, so lacking in appeal to the masses ..."
"The British and American bourgeoisie, tied to a system of private
property hopelessly archaic vis-a-vis the economic demands of modern
"''arf::re,
:~.re
unable to organize production efficiently enough to win
their own imperialist war." In the same piece Macdonald insisted
that the pursuit of the war under the existing social system can lead
only to fascism, whether through victory or defeat: "The alternatives
